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26 February 2013

the way I'm increasingly seeing the world is something that people don't really overtly discuss much: as exchanges of power.→[More:] This idea has a sort of lefty sociology hue but on the contrary I think it's the only thing that matters if you're doing a pragmatic analysis of situations. What does it mean if someone allied with the local government got away with something until there was a national media outcry at which point they got arrested? Earlier they had localized power, later national power overruled the protection they had in their fiefdom. All the other stuff about what's fair, right or wrong was subservient to the power structures in play.

I think this is also cause I've been living in India too long, lol. I've been having a series of epiphanies about developing countries, it's a really bad situation in most of them. The sort of US-style discourse I'm used to is so inapplicable to a place where life is so arbitrary. I don't want to generalize too much off limited experience (in both spheres) but I really do think the sort of language people use even when arguing in the States is so inapplicable to the average mentality here which is deeply submerged in propensity for violent escalation, social class and identity based privilege